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A thousand cuts slowly slice into Romney's dream

By Michael Goldman

Updated:
10/08/2012 01:51:54 PM EDT

The first debate is over and President Barack Obama is still standing.

No knockout blow; no October surprise; and no magic moment.

For weeks pundits of all stripes had been unwavering in their universal assessment that only a political miracle could give Mitt Romney a sliver of a chance to stop Obama's momentum and reverse the tidal wave that is going to hit the Republican candidate on Nov. 6.

Think of the pre-debate mountain he faced.

Of the so-called 10 battleground states still allegedly in play, Romney had to win seven for him to cobble together the 270 electoral votes necessary for victory.

Yet for weeks, nine of the 10 states (New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Virginia, Nevada, Florida, Wisconsin and Iowa) all had Obama in the lead and this past week for the first time the 10th state (North Carolina) had the race as a 48-48 percent dead heat.

For Romney, who had long dreamed of avenging the political implosion his father endured in 1968 when a single word -- "brainwashing" -- upended his dream of capturing the presidency, this has to be a bitter reality to endure.

Over the next weeks, months and years, pundits of all stripes will dissect the campaign looking for a single moment, a single decision or a single word that did Mitt in.

They can save their time.

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This campaign had neither a Duke-in-the-tank photo nor an I-knew-Jack-Kennedy-and-you're-no-Jack-Kennedy moment. In point of fact, Mitt's political death was caused by a thousand small cuts, all of which cumulatively created a candidate who was unable to stop the political bleeding.

Think about it. Obama never even had to run the campaign he'd planned to run.

How many commercials have you seen about Romney, the guy on all sides of every issue, who is so craven he'll say anything to anyone to get their vote? None!

The original Obama strategy was to portray Romney as more of a prevaricator than Al Gore, and as more of a flip-flopper than Sen. John Kerry. Those commercials were never run because they weren't needed to produce a victory.

In no particular order, here are but a few of the small cuts, the accumulation of which left Mitt Romney unable to create, let alone sustain, his own economic narrative against Obama, an electoral plan of attack that looked so promising just months ago.

Let's start with the Etch-A-Sketch distraction; the convention missteps including, but not limited to the Clint Eastwood debacle; the failure to acknowledge the military personnel fighting in our nation's two longest wars; and finally the selection of a vice-presidential running mate whose truthfulness was challenged when he was caught exaggerating how fast he ran a marathon, and whose previous advocacy of the wildly unpopular idea of vouchers for those on Social Security put that subject front and center in the political debate rather than Obama's performance as president.

We move on to the stories of Bain Capital; of outsourcing jobs overseas; of caring more for corporate profits than for American communities left devastated and American workers left without pensions; of bank accounts in the Grand Caymans and Switzerland; and of an inability to seem to connect at all to the fears and to the dreams of ordinary Americans.

We continue with the disastrous trip to England; the valuable time wasted rightly distancing his campaign from the fiasco of Missouri's U.S. Rep. Todd Akin's rape comment; the additional weeks squandered on how many years of tax returns needed to be released in order to get the press off his back; his incomprehensible comment that if George H.W. Bush was a "Big Tent" republican and George W. Bush was a "compassionate conservative," he was a "severe conservative"; and finally the infamous 47 percent moment that reinforced all the predisposed biases the public held about him.

I could go on, but the point's been made.

None of these issues alone could do Romney in.

Together, however, they guaranteed the re-election of Obama.

Most times presidential campaigns rise and fall on moments.

2012 will be remembered as the campaign of a thousand cuts.

Michael Goldman is a senior consultant for the Government Insight Group in Boston.

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